Mesa Has Already Seen More Code Changes This Year Than All Of 2015

[franglais125]

Bad call. dungeon can answer all of those questions with "yes"

That would be hilarious, and totally justify my confusion at the same time!

[dungeon]

I can answer them as No too if you like, as i really see no difference As both are more or less opensource and only question might be where is that source

So answer to that is that AMD has source of both, so what is the question there

[dungeon]

So today AMD build new hotfix driver 16.8.3 from source for Windows and now i am going to different machine to try it

[smitty3268]

Since this thread seems to be about random topics, I'll randomly ask about dungeon .

I don't mean any offense and I'm not trying to be sarcastic, I'm seriously asking since I'm a bit confused. The reason is that he seems to use a lot of sarcasm, and with a lot of sentences being broken, in the end I totally lack context to understand what he means (usually smth about mesa vs Catalyst vs AMDGPU, etc.).

dungeon (or someone who understands):
1. Are you for or against open source video drivers?
2. Are you for or against AMDGPU?
3. Are you for or against AMDGPU-PRO?
4. Is Catalyst good or bad for you?

Cheers

I think Dungeon just likes to start conversations (lol that's a generous way of saying it) and gets very focused on extremely narrow topics to the exclusion of all else.

So when 1 tiny thing bugs him, everything is awful and nothing matters except that 1 thing.

For a while he's been saying to use the proprietary drivers because of some bugs he is worried about in the OSS ones, but before that he was all about using the OSS drivers. So he just likes to make waves, I don't think he's got a strong political view on them.

[dungeon]

No, i don't make waves. It is true that i am actually very long time opensource driver user and still i am and it is true that i switched to try Catalyst last year.

And i switched there just to checked out what in the hell people complain about it there... opensource guys complain so much at time and now still about those blobs to the point that that became total unreal and for real i did not found much wrong there, other then some parts or most are blobs... what is wrong with this other then that i dunno, nothing - i actually found it is unbreakable stable in comparison to oss

[dungeon]

So i stayed there for months, to see what is so wrong there and found nothing much really.

And what happened in the mean time with oss, on first day i returned i found 3 regressions that affect just me where i can't move anymore in any direction So in couple months of all git absence all became unusable

[dungeon]

So today AMD build new hotfix driver 16.8.3 from source for Windows and now i am going to different machine to try it

You have a typo in youtube profile AMD - yours trully bugreporter He, he, who cares about youtube

[Chewi]

Expect another big round of changes as the Etnaviv driver will probably be merged this year.

[starshipeleven]

I looked at the site, this program could really *terminally* damage your hardware, it is GOOD for you that it isn't easy.

How totally unexpected, all programs that flash stuff can erase the ROM in the devices they are flashing, and if something goes wrong they can brick them.

Every time I flash a BIOS/UEFI I'm crapping myself whether I'll lose the hardware. In a program like this, there should be many nag screens telling you about the risks, this one makes you read the docs.

Buy a usb bios flasher supported by flashrom (lately they added support for the cheep chinese ones based on CH341A chip, ebay is crawling with them and they work fine). In case the flash fails you can always take the chip, reflash it again with your tool, and save the hardware.

Really it's just a memory chip, no need to shit pants.

I usually prefer boards where the chip is on a socket, so I don't need to desolder the bugger to reflash it.

[starshipeleven]

Why are you trying to reflash a VGA BIOS, anyway?

many developers on linux forget to face with final users, they assume that user is a programmer. That's one of the reasons many users refuse to approach with linux operating systems. many developers don't have the intelligence to understand the simplicity.

I'm not a developer but I don't have much time, if you can use google you can find documentation and tutorials that explain how to operate one of the most common multi-platform flashing tools of the planet. Most people learned how to use it by RTFM.

Since I'm kind I'm providing links and some explanation, but note that I'm not supposed to.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...Linux#Flashrom <--this explains how to use it

It's not likely it will actually detect the chip in the card although it MIGHT for 3000 or older cards, while it will likely detect the BIOS in your motherboard. Please make sure you aren't flashing a VGA BIOS in your motherboard by looking at the bios chip on it and see what code is printed on it, with the commands above, flashrom shows the codes of all flash chips it sees.

If it does not detect it you need to get a supported tool that can flash that kind of memory chips off ebay, search "CH341A" and you'll find a ton for cheep. Like 5$ or less. They are supported in flashrom as of version 0.9.9 https://www.flashrom.org/Flashrom/0.9.9

Desolder the memory chip from the VGA, it looks like this http://wayback.archive.org/web/20080...ATI_BIOS_flash , but you will need to read the code etched on the chip shell and google it to find schematics so you can confirm that it is actually a memory chip and not a power chip or whatever else. If you are lucky it will have a sticker or something on it with VGABIOS version or something.

The schematics are also useful to know what pins must be connected where on your flashing device. They usually follow this standard https://www.flashrom.org/Bus_Pirate , but it's better to check. chips usually have a notch on one side so you can orient them correctly.

Always remember to do a backup of the current contents of the flash chip, so that in case what you flash afterwards does not work you can always roll back to what it had by flashing your backup again. (in the tutorial it's the flashrom --programmer internal -c "CHIPNAME" -r backup_CHIPNAME.bin that will read the contents and write them into a file called backup_CHIPNAME.bin)

Also there are companies that sell you pre-flashed chips, so if you identify yours (so they can send you a similar or same one) and provide them what to flash in the new one, they can do it for like 10$ or something.